GP also failed to mention Amazon's little side business, AWS. More than anything else, AWS makes Amazon one of the most visionary and capable companies in the world to me, before even getting into rolling out Kindle and pretty much creating the e-book market overnight.
I didn't forget to mention Android; which other mobile OS did anyone think I meant?
As for AWS, you hit the nail on the head: I think it's Amazon's little side business. I haven't seen any detailed figures about where their income comes from, but I'm guessing AWS is almost lost in the noise compared to what they make on retail directly and via their marketplace.
Moreover, I think cloud services is a much easier market for others to attack, and obviously some already do. In contrast, there isn't really any other global retail giant on the Web today and the barrier to becoming one is prohibitively high for just about anyone.
Finally, I'm not a great believer in everything-in-the-cloud anyway. Too many people have made grand claims about how security/reliability/whatever is improved if you use cloud services compared to doing things in house, how much money you can save, how much faster you can be up and running, yada yada. And yet, we've seen numerous major outages now from even the big players, and plenty more complaints about pricing, lack of flexibility, etc. on top of those.
Basically, the cloud services emperor might not be naked, but he's close to indecent. My money is on the company that utterly dominates on-line retail, and if its internal services architecture brings in a little on the side as well, great.
Amazon's core business has huge revenue numbers but really crap margins. They're walmart.
AWS, while a much smaller revenue number, has crazy margins compared to retailing. That makes it interesting out of proportion to percentage of revenue, especially if you believe the cloud will continue to grow.
Same thing with Kindle -- vertical integration, and capturing margin along the way, using their huge retail footprint.
